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Bush enjoys outdoors, apparently hates environment
As George W. Bush feverishly grants his final favors to polluters, miners and drillers in the form of midnight regulations, Colorado officials, including Ken Salazar, Mark Udall and Bill Ritter, stand by helpless as the regulations become law.
About two weeks after this year's election, when Bush was finally free of political repercussions, his administration began inserting last-minute rules, some of which will take considerable effort by the new administration to overturn. This is nothing new... both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton inserted some last-minute rules, but Bush is doing it at an absurd level, almost twice the rate of the Clinton White House.
One rule, which goes into effect exactly three days before Barack Obama is sworn in, opens up about 2 million acres of land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming for the mining of oil shale. Oil shale is expensive to extract (especially in terms of water) and it presents almost unlimited problems relating to pollution and contamination. Here's Salazar on oil shale:
"The administration has admitted that it has no idea how much of Colorado's water supply would be required to develop oil shale, no idea where the power would come from and no idea whether the technology is even viable."
Other than that though, apparently Bush's Interior Department and Bureau of Land Management have got everything under control. To top it off, the last-minute rule also cuts the royalties from oil shale mining by more than half, from 12.5 percent to 5 percent.
In her column today in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan looks at a renewed sense of shame in America, whether it's the Big 3 CEOs of the Auto Industry hanging their heads after being chastised for flying in private jets to ask congress for money, or even Oprah canceling her annual hedonistic "favorite things" episode. But George W. Bush and Dick Cheney simply have no sense of shame. I'm almost going to miss all of this debauchery.
